The Meaning of Charlie Armanio

XV

I DON'T REMEMBER THE last time I had stepped into Charlie Armanio's room. I don't remember the last time Charlie Armanio's room was this dirty. I don't remember the last time Charlie Armanio's mother wasn't home. I don't remember Charlie Armanio as well as I used to.

His beige room is untidy, from my position at the door. His clothes are scattered over the floor and his posters of Italy's architecture are smothered with dust. They seem to reflect my thoughts on the time. The time. It's been so long. A whole month has passed and Charlie Armanio hasn't woken up, and some think he's never going to. They don't say it out loud, but their eyes hold the secrets their mouths won't tell.

Their thoughts scream to be let out, it's clawing at them and makes them so blinded that they can't see that Charlie Armanio isn't actually dead, Charlie Armanio is still breathing.

There are others who say what they think, mostly in the girl's bathroom and the library and lunch tables and in front of me. Charlie Armanio and his group of social misfits seem to be a good conversation topic while walking to class, or reading, or smearing on more lipstick. He's never going to wake up is usually the next thing said, then, he's nothing at all when they pass by me.

He's not even a whisper. He's nothing.

But some days there's hope. Some days when I go to see him, and I have a single letter in hand, I can almost pretend that the others don't exist. And that there's nothing that's important other than me, and the paper and the unresponsive boy.

I've made Charlie Armanio's room a happy one, where there are only smiles and laughs. I walk in there with a smile on my face, and pretend he's happy to see me, and the letter I'm holding in my hands that he cannot see, but yet in my eyes he's smiling from his stationary and odd position on the bed, and his eyes are glowing and he's telling me he's missed me and has been waiting for this letter for the whole day!

But other days, the days when Dr Richard says I'm the most truthful, I walk into his room with a straight face and ask if it gets better. I talk to the unresponsive boy as if this unresponsiveness isn't a barrier. I talk to the unresponsive boy the way I talked to my best friend and I decide at the end, most times there is no end, but I decide at the end end, that it is what it is and if it wants to get better, it might.

I make sure Charlie Armanio's room looks exactly like a photo copy of his old one with the exception of the walls, the walls change everything. His are beige but the unresponsive boy's are blue and my God does Charlie hate blue.

I tried to talk one of the nurses into me painting it a brown or beige, but she didn't even give me an answer. I had been so desperate to change those walls that I didn't even realise that there's no way I can paint a hospital room any colour I'd like because it harbours my best friend. So, to make up for this loss, I hand up some printed posters of some of those monuments he would talk about so often. Though close to none of my spellings were correct, I happened to get a few posters like La Torre Pendente di Pisa and Piazza del Popolo. But looking at his room now, in all its familiar glory, I realize that nothing can make any room look like Charlie Armanio because alone it was in fact, just a room. A room with Italian Architecture Posters flung around and deep beige colouring. Charlie Armanio was the piece that made this room his and the reason I wasn't able to recreate this there was because Charlie Armanio's aura made everything that was his so Charlie and sadly, Charlie wasn't acting like the same Charlie.

With hesitant steps, I walk deeper into the room, trying to make as little noise as possible even though, I was the only one home. There are clothes and books and glass shards littered across the floor and as I pad deeper, the soles of my boots crush them up. I push away the clothes and the wood. This mess doesn't look like something Charlie's hands would do, it looks as if someone was looking for something and ransacked the whole place. I mean, come on, the shards of glass? The splinters of wood? His broken desk in the left corner? Charlie would never do this; he's not a violent person at all. There's even a hole in the wall.